Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Mr. Isaac is out this week, so Joe Plambeck, deputy technology editor, is filling in.

Farhad: Howdy, Joe! Mike has the week off, so I’m thrilled to have a big-shot tech editor like you join the discussion. As I tell every guest who takes Mike’s place here, you have some small shoes to fill.

Joe: Thanks, Farhad. It’s a joy to be here. To get myself in something of a Mike Mode, I’ve been reading about tech while eating burritos on my couch all week. I must say, what a life that guy lives.

Farhad: On to this week’s news. First, there were lots of new products. Amazon announced two new versions of its Echo voice-controlled assistant — one of them is portable, and the other is meant for plugging into your home stereo. The move suggests that Amazon sees the device, which many once ridiculed, as a potential hit.

DJI introduced a new drone, the Phantom 4, that does something amazing: It can see its environment and fly by itself, avoiding obstacles. Considering that many consumer drone flights end in crashes, autonomous flight could be a huge breakthrough — if, that is, it works.

Joe: That is an important if. And I’m not sure the self-flying machines will make the many regulators and lawmakers who are skeptical of drones — and who are one of the biggest hurdles to truly widespread adoption — any less skeptical.

Yahoo also made a small bit of news this week, and not of the negative sort flowing out of the company for many months now. Just a few weeks ago, Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s embattled leader, said she was going to dial back on its editorial ambitions. But this week, Yahoo introduced a new site for e-sports. It’s an expansion of Yahoo Sports, one of the company’s few bright spots, and e-sports is obviously a booming area of interest online.

Let’s also not overlook more rumblings out of Europe. The German competition authority opened an investigation into whether Facebook is abusing its dominant position to collect personal information about users. The investigation raises an interesting question: Could Facebook be pushing people to give up more information than they would like because they have no other good social networking option? It isn’t the sort of antitrust investigation we usually see.

Farhad: And then there was big news in goggles.

Joe: Part of me can’t believe you just wrote that sentence.

Farhad: Look, goggles are the next big thing! Microsoft began taking orders for a preview version of the HoloLens, the company’s “augmented-reality” glasses, which allow you to see and manipulate digital objects superimposed on the real world. They’ll sell for $3,000, but they’re not ready for prime time; Microsoft says this early version is for developers looking to build HoloLens apps. A start-up called Meta also began taking orders for the second version of its A.R. goggles — those sell for $949, and they, too, are meant for developers.

Finally, two pioneers in cryptography, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, received the Turing Award this week, also known as the Nobel Prize of computing. The timing was interesting, as it came during the increasingly heated battle between Apple and the F.B.I. over encryption and the iPhone — the very technology inspired by the two men’s work.

And that gets us to our main topic for the week. Much of the tech industry rallied around Apple this week: Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snapchat and Yahoo all signed on to legal briefs in support of Apple’s position, though not without some internal hand-wringing. The battle lines in this case are becoming increasingly clear. Tech is on one side and Washington is on the other. Over the last couple of years, many tech giants, including Google and Facebook, have tried to establish closer relationships with lawmakers and regulators. What do you think this case means for the standing of tech in D.C.?

Joe: There seems to be an interesting rally-around-the-flag trend in Silicon Valley. In recent years, the industry has coalesced for a few big fights in Washington, including SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act — and net neutrality.

What’s unclear is what the Silicon Valley flag stands for. I don’t know how much of this is about principles and how much is just about the pursuit of profit. The efforts do seem pretty effective, though, and I think we should expect only more of this. The industry has long had disdain for Washington; now, with business booming and the companies as powerful as ever, it seems to have learned how to express the disdain for political ends. Where do you think this could manifest itself next?

Farhad: I think it’s still an open question whether the tech industry has real power in Washington, at least compared with other moneyed industries, like media or oil and gas or finance. Sure, tech can muster a big push when there are collective threats to how it works — SOPA being the prime example — but the industry is less effective at advancing its interests.

For instance, techies have been pushing for immigration reform for years; Mark Zuckerberg made it a signature issue earlier this decade. What happened? Nothing.

Joe: That’s exactly right. I do think the message coming from government officials this week on the issue of encryption was quite interesting. For the first week or so after the fight with Apple became public, the F.B.I. and the Obama administration seemed to do a lot of aggressive chest-thumping on this issue. This week, though, some top government officials visited tech’s backyard and had a different sort of message: Let’s find some common ground.

Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter, for example, said he did not want companies to create so-called back doors to their products. The F.B.I. has been saying something similar, but that message has largely been drowned out by the bureau’s bullhorn calls for Apple to break into the phone of one of the shooters involved in the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attack.

And of course, what Mr. Carter and the F.B.I. consider a back door is not exactly what the tech industry does. There is clearly a disconnect on many levels between Silicon Valley and Washington.

Farhad: They’re two different worlds, and they’ll only move further apart. Pretty much like my relationship with Mike. Anyway, at least I got a break from him this week. This was fun, Joe. Till next time!